UK Film Industry needs to go no Budget

The UK Film Makers are apparently wasting huge amounts of money. I would argue this is on commercially non-viable films that no one wants to see. RThis may be due to our “arts” approach to media rather than a business approach, but we can find a happy medium where we maintain artistic integrity while producing something on budget that actually has an audience.

Rushing half-baked scripts into production, then fixing problems during the shoot or at the editing stage, also took its toll on production costs, Jones warned. So did agents who demanded that their actors got first-class travel, their own makeup artist and a special diet.

“For every cinema ticket sold, 75% goes to the cinema, so what goes back to the film-makers is usually a quarter of the box-office figure,” said Jones. “If you’re running a business, making multimillion-pound productions, you cannot afford routinely to lose money.”

He added that the British film industry could not continue to spend millions of pounds making films that, with the latest technology, should no longer cost more than £500,000. “In 2010 there’s been a tidal wave of new technology – particularly the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, a camera that costs £1,500 and yields images like 35mm film [used in cinemas]. The digital equivalent would have cost £100,000 only a year ago. You don’t need expensive cameras any more.”

So, new direction – let’s train students to organise and budget! Oh, wait… we already do…

But there’s something queasy about the other side of this equation too: the finger-wagging tallying of unrecouped funds, with the implication that British film should be solely focused on movies made to turn a profit (often described with varying accuracy as “films people want to see”). All very sexily hard-headed, of course – but at the same time meaningless. Every Hollywood studio exists to make money – they also know that every film is a gamble, and cheap, explicitly commercial movies die lonely deaths at the box office just as often as every other kind.